Father Dwight Longenecker will be no stranger to readers of The Imaginative Conservative. Apart from the numerous essays that he has written for this illustrious journal for more years than I care or dare to remember, he has written many excellent books. As with the essays, so with the books. They are manifold in number and multifarious in theme, though they all touch upon the essential correlation between faith and culture, especially literature. His recently published autobiography, There and Back Again: A Somewhat Religious Odyssey, is one of the finest and most entertaining conversion stories that I have ever read, and I’ve read many!
There is, however, more to Father Longenecker than meets the unsuspecting eye. Ever since his days at Bob Jones University, many moons ago, he has been fascinated with, and enamoured of, the theatre. Many moons after his days as a thespian undergraduate, he revisited the campus of BJU in the company of the present author to see a splendid production of The Merchant of Venice. Now, having always been inspired by Shakespeare, he has taken up the playwright’s pen himself in emulation of the Bard of Avon.
It’s difficult to know where to start when discussing Father Dwight’s dramatic works. As with his essays and books, his plays are both manifold and multifarious.
Let’s begin with his radio plays. He has written a series of five fifteen-minute audio dramas on the life of the great English martyr Saint Nicholas Owen for The Saints Podcast, an exciting series produced by The Merry Beggars, the entertainment arm of Relevant Radio. The founder of The Merry Beggars, Peter Atkinson, is a graduate of Ave Maria University, at which I had the pleasure of teaching him literature. I can therefore claim a modicum of fame, or at least influence, basking in my former student’s reflected glory.
Following the success of his first sortie into the realm of dramatized audio hagiography, Father Dwight is currently working on a similar series on the life of Saint Vincent de Paul, and has been commissioned to follow this with a third series on Saint José Luis Sánchez del Río, the recently canonized child martyr who was killed by the communists in Mexico during the Cristero War.
Expressive of Father Longenecker’s predilection for dabbling in multiple genres, Aconite and Church Lace is a full-length pastiche of Joseph Kesselring’s comedy classic, Arsenic and Old Lace. Kesselring’s play will be known to many for the unforgettable film version starring Cary Grant. Father Dwight’s spin on the play is a rambunctious anti-woke satire set in a liberal Catholic convent in Boston where the sisters “take care of” the bishop’s problem priests. In a similar vein is Only You, subtitled Hillbilly Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, an uproarious version of Shakespeare’s comedy set in the American South in the 1950s.
On a more serious note, Free Will, a three-act family drama influenced by Father Dwight’s experience of Bob Jones University, takes place at the fictional Standish College, an Evangelical private college in Alabama. Bill Standish, the college president, is ready to retire but is unsure whether his son, Billy, is suitable to step into his shoes. He is concerned that he might be a homosexual but discovers something much worse when he learns that Billy is becoming a Catholic.
Having multiple creative irons in many inspirational fires, Father Dwight has also written The Joshua Tree, a fantasy adventure for middle school students, which was premiered recently at Our Lady of the Rosary school in Greenville, South Carolina. I had the great pleasure of attending a performance of this truly enchanting play with my sixteen-year-old daughter. As with The Chronicles of Narnia, to which The Joshua Tree is clearly indebted, several children find themselves passing through a magical portal into another world, from which vibrant colour is absent and everything is a drab, dreary and dismal shade of grey. This world is ruled by a wicked witch who serves as headmistress of the “school”, which is really a workhouse and bootblacking factory, the latter of which is a deferential biographical nod to Dickens who worked in such a factory as a child. Other deferential intertextual nods are made in the direction of The Wizard of Oz, Peter Pan and the Harry Potter books, in addition to the aforementioned nod towards Narnia.
Such are the works that the indefatigable Father Dwight has already brought to fruition. Other works in progress include Samantha Sitwell, a play for adults in which a young parochial vicar becomes the victim of a complicated, sultry and sinister scam, and Gangster Island, another play for Middle School students, which is a reworking of Treasure Island set in 1930s Chicago with gangsters instead of pirates.
If the foregoing should leave us feeling a little in awe at what Hopkins would call “the achieve of the thing”, other works that Father Dwight describes as being “in the pipeline” include The Conscience of the King, the story of Elizabeth Barton, “the Holy Maid of Kent” who was executed on the orders of Henry VIII; The Philosopher and the Little Flower, a dramatized conversation between St Thérèse and Frederich Nietzsche reminiscent of some of the fictionalized conversations of historical figures in the works of Peter Kreeft; and The Shakespeare Plot in which William Shakespeare has to rescue his feisty fifteen-year-old daughter after she attempts to assassinate Queen Elizabeth I.
In addition, Father Dwight is hoping to help establish the Recusant Players, a theatre company for Upstate South Carolina Catholics. Should he succeed in doing so, the new repertory company will have a great repertoire of new plays by their founder to produce and perform. What is also needed, however, are patrons of the arts who are as enthusiastic and indefatigable as Father Dwight and who share his vision. If we are to awaken the “woke”, we need to have the cultural weapons with which to do it. A living Catholic and Christian cultural revival can evangelize our times with new works of beauty, truth and goodness. Inspired by the great works of the past, new works in the present can help build a new world in the future.
A final word for those potential patrons of this much-needed revival: It’s time to step up to the plate. It’s time to stand up and be counted. It’s time for your financial support to be counted upon.
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The featured image is courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
